Liberal Illusions Caused Ukraine Crisis, Harvard Prof Claims

The situation in Ukraine is bad and getting worse. Russia is poised to invade and demanding airtight guarantees that NATO will never, ever expand farther to the east, and negotiations do not appear to be succeeding, claims Foreign Policy columnist Stephen M. Walt in a recent analysis.

Photo Insert: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov during the last talks held between the two countries tackling the Ukraine predicament.

Both the US and its NATO allies are beginning to contemplate how they will make Russia pay should it press forward with an invasion. A real war is now a distinct possibility, which would have far-reaching consequences for everyone involved, especially Ukraine’s citizens.

The great tragedy is this entire affair was avoidable. Had the US and its European allies not succumbed to hubris, wishful thinking, and liberal idealism and relied instead on realism’s core insights, the present crisis would not have occurred. Indeed, Russia would probably never have seized Crimea, and Ukraine would be safer today.

The world is paying a high price for relying on a flawed theory of world politics, Walt insisted, in effect arguing that Russia should have been defanged when the Soviet Union collapsed.

At the most basic level, realism begins with the recognition that wars occur because there is no agency or central authority that can protect states from one another and stop them from fighting if they choose to do so. Given that war is always a possibility, states compete for power and sometimes use force to try to make themselves more secure or gain advantages.

There is no way states can know for certain what others may do in the future, which makes them reluctant to trust one another and encourages them to hedge against the possibility that another powerful state may try to harm them at some point down the road.

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